The first striking thing about the recent letter signed by 1,100 law professors urging the U.S. Senate not to confirm attorney general nominee Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., is its extraordinary arrogance and presumption. What makes such a huge gaggle of academics so sure that 1) the Senate is incapable of determining on its own the qualifications of Sessions for a Cabinet position, and 2) What makes them think they know more than senators?

The pious pontification of the law professoriate has become cliche in modern America, leading many pundits (correctly in my view) to criticize our current president for his tendency to think like a law professor, and to view the world in the abstract, removed and unrealistic way in which it is seen from the faculty lounge.

One law professor, Harvard's Duncan Kennedy, nicely limned the problem, when he declared, as a law student at Yale, that his teachers were "either astoundingly intellectually self-confident or just plain smug." He went on to state that their classroom gestures seemed to say, "I am brilliant. I am famous in the only community that matters. I am doing the most difficult and most desirable thing in the world, and doing it well. I am being a Law Professor." Kennedy published those words in 1970, but the problem is even worse now.

The exaggerated self-importance of the teacher of law is buttressed by immersion in an ideology very different from what most senators and most Americans believe about the law in particular and the world in general. It is strongest in the elite bastions of the Ivy League and on the coasts, where most American law professors trained. Now, one can find it dispersed in most of our centers of legal education.

Attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions is trying to mislead his Senate colleagues, and the country, into believing he is a champion for civil rights. We are former Justice Department civil rights lawyers who worked on the civil rights cases that Sessions cites as evidence for this claim, so we...

(J. Gerald Hebert, Joseph D. Rich, William Yeomans)

That ideology is a culmination of a century of the ascendance in the law school of a set of beliefs that seem to convince most professors that the law is really no different from politics and

that it is infinitely malleable. For too long, they say, the law has has been used as a tool of the rich and powerful to oppress women, minorities and the powerless. It should be the task of judges, legislators, and lawyers alone, they say, to interpret the Constitution and laws and to use that malleability to redistribute power and resources to the oppressed.

There has certainly been injustice in America, but most Americans believe the law should not be used to foster redistribution but to secure life, liberty and property. For them — and President-elect Donald Trump sensed this — the law and the Constitution should be what they were for Trump's judicial hero, the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia: fixed guideposts to contribute to the preservation of freedom and opportunity for all Americans. As times change, the law and the Constitution need to change, but this should be done by the orderly processes of legislation and constitutional amendment, not by a judge or a Justice Department bent on ruling by fiat rather than by the rule of law.

It was lonely being a Donald Trump supporter in the legal academy. Of my thousands of colleagues teaching law in this country, I don't think more than a few dozen believed that he would have made a better president than Hillary Clinton, and not more than a handful of us were willing to go public...

It was lonely being a Donald Trump supporter in the legal academy. Of my thousands of colleagues teaching law in this country, I don't think more than a few dozen believed that he would have made a better president than Hillary Clinton, and not more than a handful of us were willing to go public...

(Stephen B. Presser)

The irate myriad of law professors have correctly understood that Sessions' view of the law is much closer (if it is not identical) to that of Scalia and Trump and not to their own. Their ideological zeal and the inevitable tendency of ideologues to believe in the insincerity and malice of those who disagree with them have led them to believe the spurious charges that torpedoed Sessions' judicial nomination decades ago, and to see him as an enemy to the groups they favor.

This is profoundly, to use Trump's word, "sad," because senators who have served with Sessions are in the best position to know the man, and to make the determination whether he is a conservative champion of the rule of law, a believer in the separation of powers and in federalism, or whether he is the malevolent monster described in these law professors' screed.

It is time for law professors to emerge from the smugness and self-delusion in which they have been mired for some time, and to recommit themselves to the noble task of teaching the law as a repository of timeless truths, as something above politics, and certainly above character assassination.

Stephen B. Presser is a professor of legal history emeritus at Northwestern University's Pritzker School of Law and the author of "Law Professors: Three Centuries of Shaping American Law."